Star Wars: The Old Republic Review - PC

Game Description:Embark on the most epic Star Wars experience to date in this story-driven MMO set during the time of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Fight your way across the galaxy as a Jedi, Sith or various other Star Wars archetypes and characters, and encounter countless friends and foes along the way in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Experience the expansive Star Wars universe like never before thanks to the SWTOR's full voice acting, an MMO first.

Star Wars: The Old Republic Review

At long last, BioWare and EA have flung wide the doors to the Galaxy Far, Far Away. Can this new take on the MMORPG make the jump to hyperspace?

The Pros

BioWare-style storytelling flawlessly integrated into MMO gameplay

Huge game with hundreds of hours of content

Companion system ensures you can always progress

Fast-paced and rewarding PvP Warzones

Top notch music and voice acting

The Cons

UI needs to be more customizable

Needs more explicit tutorials for non-MMO players

Star Wars: The Old Republic Review

After many years, numerous jaw-dropping cinematic trailers, and countless X-Play preview segments, Star Wars: The Old Republic has finally gone live. BioWare has long-stated that their ambition with this sprawling massively multiplayer online game is to deliver essentially eight new installments of their lauded Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series, one per character class. It’s an impossible goal, one that strains the limits of credulity and, most likely, modern game development. Yet, after nearly a hundred hours of play time on numerous classes, I have to admit that, as far as I am concerned, they have actually done it.

Star Wars: The Old Republic (henceforth SWTOR, pronounced either "SWO-tor" or "sweater" depending on your preference) takes place about 3500 years before the films, but you might have a hard time knowing that by looking at it. Most of SWTOR will be familiar to any fan of the films, right down to Fett-ish armor on the Bounty Hunters and clonetrooper armor on the Troopers. This rather ingenious move allows the game to present familiar Star Warsian archetypes without getting bogged down in the film era timeline and characters.

You have eight classes to choose from: Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Smuggler and Trooper on the Republic side and Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor, Imperial Agent and Bounty Hunter on the Empire side. Each has its own storyline that is entirely different from the other seven. As a fairly hardcore Star Wars fan, I ended up drawn to the Imperial Agent more than the others, primarily because it’s the only class without a movie archetype behind it. While the Smuggler class is obviously going to be a Han Solo-esque story and the Bounty Hunter is going to make you into a Fauxba Fett, Imperial Agent explores a fairly uncharted nook of the Star Wars galaxy. It was refreshing to play through a Star Wars story that was able to surprise me.

Of course, if you’re more into swinging a saber or suiting up in plasteel heavy armor, SWTOR has interesting and well-written stories for you in those classes, too. BioWare’s hallmark has always been storytelling, and they have managed to merge high production value story scenes with MMO gameplay in a disturbingly compelling manner. Every character you interact with is fully voiced, from the main characters in your storyline to the lowly trooper who needs a hand killing ten enemy snipers in the field. This adds a tremendous amount to the game, and even members of the G4 staff who expected to skip through the cutscenes have found themselves watching every one of them. When your character needs to say something, a Mass Effect style choice wheel pops up and you choose the tone of the response, with the traditional KOTOR reward of Dark or Light Side points for specific choices. If you’re in a group of players, each player picks a response, and the game rolls a number for each player to determine who gets to actually speak in the cutscene.

The story and its presentation pulls you into the world in a way unlike any other MMO out there. While everyone who played World of Warcraftwas attached to their characters because of the time put into them and their utility in the game, your SWTOR character are actually, well, characters. You don’t just care about what gear they’re wearing or what their crit chance is, you have a clear idea of who they are thanks to the storyline and your choices in it. When I play through a quest, I not only hope I get a good loot drop from the boss, I’m looking forward to seeing what happens to my Agent from a narrative perspective, too.

As far as the actual gameplay, the old "WoW with lightsabers" chestnut manages to be both right and wrong. You do spend a lot of time killing a certain number of things or gathering a certain number of items, and WoW players will find a lot of familiar quest design here. However, the actual combat is different in that it does not use WoW’s queue system and auto-attacking. Each attack in SWTOR corresponds to a press of a button as it happens, and the result is a more action-oriented feel to the combat. It probably resembles City of Heroes/Villains more than anything else, but comparisons to other MMOs pretty much go out the window when your Sith Marauder is flying through the air about to bring his twin lightsabers down on a boss monster’s head.

Interestingly, BioWare made sure that everyone could play SWTOR even without other players around. Each class gets a group of companion characters that can serve different combat functions, from tanks to healers to damage dealers. This means that squishy mage-types will be able to have a tank around to soak up damage, and low-damage tanks will have a high-damage buddy to help make progress faster. You’ll find yourself quickly overwhelmed if you try to take on group instances or Heroic zones on with just you and your companion, but normal quests can always be tackled in this manner, guaranteeing that you can always make forward progress in the game, even if you don’t want to group with other players. It’s a brilliant system that will likely open the game up to people who aren’t as experienced or even interested in the MMO aspect of things. SWTOR is pretty good about giving you a variety of things to do on top of the story quests. Heroic areas and quests force grouping up with others, and the vast majority of pick-up groups I’ve been part of have been enjoyable and successful, at least so far.

Flashpoints are story-driven instance missions that are generally tougher than in-world Heroics, and generally result in some of the best loot. The Flashpoints are where the group conversation mechanics really get a chance to shine. There are also Operations, which are the SWTOR equivalent of raid dungeons, but since very few have actually hit the endgame content at this point, and I’m not one of them, I can only tell you they exist.

PvP is somewhat limited at this point, featuring three Warzone maps to play and of course the usual in-world combat between factions. Thankfully the three Warzones are tremendous fun and very different from one another. Huttball is a gladiatorial/sporting contest that challenges two teams to move a ball down a trap-laden field to score at an opposing team’s end zone. Voidstar is an attack/defend style map similar to the Rush gametype in Battlefield. Alderaan, my personal favorite, is a Conquest-style map in which the teams try to control three turbolaser cannons. Each cannon under your control continuously fires at an enemy capital ship hovering in the distance, and whichever team shoots down the enemy cap ship first wins. More content is obviously on the way, but this first taste is a very positive one. The objectives are interesting and the rewards are substantial.

SWTOR features a very unusual crafting system in that your character doesn’t actually do any of it. You acquire three crew skills early in the game, one for crafting, one for gathering resources, and one for "missions." You can send your crew members out on quests for the latter two, which causes them to disappear for a set amount of time and bring items back when they return. They also handle all the crafting. You just queue up to five items for them to make and they go off and make them for you. The advantage of this is that you can go do other stuff while your crew grinds for you. For instance, once you get your ship you can take on action-based space missions whenever you like. These are tube shooters, like Space Harrier or After Burner, and are a great time killer for when your crew members are out on crafting missions.

The trouble with the crafting is that it’s not very clearly explained by the game, and can require a lot of trial and error to get your head around. In fact, one of the game’s only serious flaws is that it’s most likely going to be somewhat impenetrable to someone who has never played an MMO before. Since I have to assume one of the goals of SWTOR is to get Star Wars fans who have not played MMOs to try this one out, it seems like SWTOR should have a much, much more detailed tutorial feature. The first planet for each class serves as something of a ten-level tutorial, with rudimentary tooltips popping up regularly, but I really think it needs a super-basic handholding mode. Ideally, when you create a character it should ask "Have you ever played an MMO before?" and if you say you haven’t, it very clearly walks you through what everything is from the ground up. It’s easy for those of us who have played MMOs for years to intuit many of SWTOR’s interface quirks and game mechanics, but a decent chunk of this game’s eventual audience may actually need things like "cooldown" and "agro" explained to them. Hopefully a future content update will address this. For now, if you’re an MMO newbie, just make sure you have an experienced friend around to help out.

It would also be nice if there were more options when it came to the user interface. The UI is surprisingly rigid and unscaleable, and the freedom to shrink elements of it and move things around would greatly improve the experience. Again, this is a minor issue, but one that will hopefully be remedied in the future.

The amount of content in Star Wars: The Old Republic is astounding. The fact that it is all incredibly damn good is borderline miraculous. We’ve known for some time that this was a tremendously ambitious project, but it’s not until digging into the game for a hundred or so hours that you start to appreciate just how damn much there is to be played here. A wide variety of players in the G4 offices have been thoroughly hooked. From MMO fans who don’t care about Star Wars to Star Wars fans who have never played an MMO to BioWare fans who don’t care about Star Wars or MMOs, reaction has been universally positive.

I honestly have spent the last few years very seriously doubting that even BioWare could pull off something as frankly crazy as what The Old Republic is attempting to do. They have succeeded far beyond my admittedly high expectations. As a KOTOR fan, I finally have my long-awaited sequel(s). As an MMO fan, I am hooked. As a Star Wars fan, I am enthralled. I’m not going to lie to you - a good chunk of this was written while waiting to get through a server queue. I’m willing to bet a good chunk of you read it while doing the same, so let’s all Alt-Tab over. We have a lot of game to play.

Comments are Closed

Granted I just started playing SWTOR and did not go through the bugs of >1.2 patch, I found many of the previous negative reviews to be a little unfair. It's actually a pretty good MMORPG. The problem is, bioware has set the standards so high that you have a lot of fans that had expectations through the roof on this one. I mean, I find myself longing for some of the aspects of SWG at times... The random wondering of planets looking for resources to mine... Scattered houses among the landscape... Every 10yrs power gamer with his glow stick camping out at spawn points running macros... I had a lot of good times with SWG and I wanted bioware's SWTOR to be everything and then some!!!! But SWTOR is not SWG.

This game has a little more "direction" to it, less of an open sandbox aspect to it... Not that it is linear like a common first-person-shooter. The emphasis is much more of the story and getting sucked into the Star Wars universe.

If I was going to name some HONEST cons, it would be:

- respawn is too fast. It isn t fun having to mow your way through mobs multiple times.

- the graphics of your character and gear seems like it came straight out of Dragon Age. your toon and gear is more than just statistical bonuses, it s an extension of your character and it gives great depth to the game experience.

- space combat needs to be remodeled. this is the one area that SWG got right. for the love of god, let me get in my ship and do what I want

- EA is involved. EA is the Wal-Mart of computer gaming. No character, no passion, just calculated profit modeling. "Let s not move too far from that sweet spot where the greatest number of possible subscribers lays". It makes for an unremarkable experience. Constantly striving to bring in those 12 - 22 yrs immature power gamers with an attention span of a gerbil. I really hate that bioware teamed up with them. I usually won't buy EA games.

So, I'm hoping as the game matures they will address some of those issues. But, in the mean time it is a solid game well worth the $39.99 I spent on it and $15 monthly subscription. As an adult with a house and a family I know how expensive "entertainment" can be. If I can half the time out of this game as I got out of SWG, it would be a super fantastic deal, dollar to dollar.

Obviously G4 was paid for this crappy review. Screw them and this crappy game and the people it originated from! LEARN TO MAKE GAMES YOU PHONIES STOP STEALING OUR MONEY! tired of you developers making crap. G4 should be ashamed of themselves for giving this garbage s 5/5. More like 2/5 BUYER BEWARE!

So I thought I would give SWTOR a go during the free weekend trial. I was hoping it was going the be the best game I had ever played. I am a MMO vet, I have played both WoW and CityofHeroes/Villans a lot. Unfortunately a lot of issues with SWTOR that I was not expecting. I am a huge fan of Bioware, and I find it very hard to believe that I am writing that this game is not as good as the reviews totted it to be.

For one the camera and controls gave me a headache, in CoH I got used to the camera adjusting to my target. Not in SWTOR. Also I think CoH does a better job in the combat arena. The re-spawn times are way to short. Nothing is worse than fighting one mob and the mob that you just killed 5 minutes ago re-spawns in and doubles the mob side. Part of me was hoping for a combat system that resembled KOTOR but in a smart MMO sort of way.

Its not a terrible MMO but its definitely not a 5 out of 5 in my book.more of a 4 out of 5.

Obvious shill is obvious. Did you really play this game? Do you look past the glaring day one bugs, the fact that 1.2=how the game shoulda been at release, or how some stories are horrible and some make no sense. You started with an Agent, the only one that is in unanimous agreement that was a well made story, but did you forget about how the Inquisitor is Ghostbusters, but if Peter after being slimed by Slimer in 1, absorbed him, then absorbed a bunch of other useless stories, then when he went to fight Gozer it made him sick, then he spent the entire movie making himself unsick from the ghosts, then when he's unsick he goes to fight Gozer again and the ghosts don't even help him. Yes....you're right...it's brilliant storytelling. Also, not wow with lightsabers? What game were you playing exactly, it's WoW with lightsabers and horrible design choices like lack of macros, an auto attack, and UI customization. So after WoW being out for 6 years, and them taking that long to release this heap, they learned how to do a worse WoW. I hope you enjoyed your fat check from Bioware for writing this garbage.

Okay, will try to be honest. Serious Star Wars fan here. Images and sound are awesome. Control is jerky and sub-par. (Yes, I'm on a well equipped comp). Load time between areas is horrible. Crew concept is different, but can't say I actually like it. Quests are okay, but the conversations are BORING. I like to power level, so waiting minutes to pick up a quest is a pain. Some of the Q's are too easy, others too hard. I've run toons in WOW from lvl 1 to 85 with maybe 10 deaths, but tonight alone I died 5 times. I grant that I may not be the best player, but on non-heroic quests, I should not be calling for the medical probe this often. Have only played AO and WOW before this one, and my overall verdirct... cancelling my account and deleting this game. Hard core Star Wars and Gaming fans, with top of the line comps, you may like this game. As for all others, save your money!

I'm not sure why people keep up their ramblemancy about this code and bits required to move this game forward. I was playing this with a friend on the first monday of the month, and we were able to spin the character, to arrive at some moment in the game when images and movement and harsh explosions are anchors, are these small boats in the middle of what's playable. I know this review is hard to follow, with its fast driving and twisting fields. But I can say without any serious judgement, I can my fingers hurt from playing and the physical therapy needed was bitterly helmed, as a boat in the slowest or moars, among the highest of tides. Those surfers, those games. This is my review....seriously...no seriously.

This game is kick-ass fun and I don't believe anything is worse with lag than WOW / the lag time is unreal and there has yet to be a resolution to the problem/ so I'm here to stay with Star Wars !!!!!! / And if I could it would be rated 10 out of 10 !!!!

This game is absolute garbage. Do not crap your money away you will be sorely disappointed, nothing like what star wars should be and the gameplay is atrocious. Don't bother looking on the swtor forums for community feedback, the moderators rapidly lock or delete any post that complains about the game. I am not making that up, its infuriating and a disgusting practice. At any one time you could be on a planet and there will be only 10 other people. ON THE WHOLE FREAKING PLANET?!#?!? Even the best graphics cards have FPS down in the teens because of poor coding. I cannot stress enough how bad this game is and how much money they have spent on making it sound good and time they have spent on covering up negative feedback. The character skills are horribly boring and clunky. The pvp is a bleeping joke!!! It should be an epic battle between the light and dark side but instead you play this boring as crap huttball where as soon as you get the ball you're cc'd to oblivion. I cannot stress how bad this game is.

It cannot be stated enough, the overall game play experience rocks, for the most part. The story lines for each class is completely different and amazing having leveled several characters all the way to 50 already I've had the chance to see the same planets, the same cities, the same questing areas multiple times, yet each time the interaction has been completely different. The problems begin when you are past all that. by the time you get to around level 48-50 where usually the real fun of an MMO starts for a lot of people. Im not talking about the standard bugs that go with a freshly released MMO, of which there are many in SWTOR, but problems that completely ruin the ability to effectively play the game. Fps fluctuates on even the most top end systems. Random lag spikes despite having a good stable internet connection and showing very low latency. Ridiculously long loading screens. Random disconnections and game client crashes. Bio-ware's answer to all this, if you can even get a response from customer service, is just insulting. They blame it on your computer, regardless of what your system is. If you have a top end graphics card they say, we'll its not the GPU its your CPU that's limiting your performance, if you have a top end graphics card and processor they blame it on windows. Do i have a top of the line system, no, but what i do have i can run World of Warcraft x2, one account running on each of my 2 monitors each on ultra setting with shadows and everything as high as they go in 1920x1080 resolution and get 60+ FPS on both at the same time with both characters in the middle of a 40 man raid boss fight. Meanwhile sitting in the Imperial Fleet in 800x600 fullscreen resolution with setting on low, shadows and everything turned off with my 2nd monitor disabled and i get at max spikes of 10-15 fps hiding in a corner staring at a wall. In warzones forget it, 5 fps on a good day. Leveling up everything is wonderful, but when you get to the higher end zones, game play becomes extremely difficult for a lot of people. Just look at the SWTOR official Customer Service forums, CSRs have to repeatedly lock threads full of complaints about performance issues due to the sheer number of posts. when you have multiple threads locked with over 104 pages of complaints in each, its time to realize and admit that there's a problem. These issues have been reported by people with everything from $300 budget PCs to $3000+ custom gaming rigs that meet and/or exceed the supposed minimum and recommended system requirements. SWTOR is steady bleeding customers due to end game performance and lack of quality customer service. I for one intend to continue playing for a while in hopes that Bio-ware gets things together and comes up with a solution for most of its issues. Unfortunately it appears so far that Bio-ware is more interested in small bugs then in the major issues costing them thousands of players. Time will tell the true fate of SWTOR.

First of all, this is not a 5 star game. A 5 star game does not have any cons. This game has more cons than stated by X-play. I don't blame X-play they get paid to do this. Sorry to say Bioware is a MMO what we would call beginners in game (noobs). This is game is definitely more of a single player game with great story lines but when are cut scenes a little too much? I am in a flash point and every time you turn around you in a cut scene. You know the saying less talk more action? I have a level 50 BH which took me about 1.5 weeks to get and I still play. I am hardcore gamer I have capped toons on FF11, WOW, Rift and this game. But, on the other note every time I log in to SW I just sit around looking for groups to run flash points. Which on my server doesn't seem to be enough people on but server says heavy. This reminds me of Final Fantasy 11 online when it used to be hard to find people to do things with. My point is where is a working grouping system its 2012 it should be a standard. Its a lot of players out their that don't like to be a leader of a group or shout for members. Either they don't want to fail as a leader to get a bad rep or they just don't know the fight well enough to lead people. A grouping system is encouragement . Next, I would like to touch on the crafting. Its ashamed that you can't craft your own item and also items are not crafted instantly. Why should u have to mins to an hr for an item to be made. You won't see people spamming for items to be made for them lol. See material gathering is cool either u can grind for mats or send your companions out. Sometimes I get lazy and don't mind sending them out. I see a lot aeriagames in this game which are free to play games. Makes me think why i'm paying to play. Example: Grand Fantasia with the crafting and companions. Last well we all know that the UI sucks also. These are just my opinions about the game. I believe EA and LucasArts picked the wrong developers but we will see how long this game will last. Not what true Star Wars fans expected. Closing, I would like to say it is a fun game for beginners that just started playing MMOs and not for hardcore gamers to stuck around. Just my opinion. Note: Its great MMOs out there just grab the good bits and pieces put it together and their is your perfect MMO.

I am ashamed that the folks at x-play think this is a good game. It has fall so far from the genre and the style of game it amounts to nothing but cow chips. There is nothing really star wars about it save for lightsabers and starships. These developers created in nearly four times the amount of development time a game that once was called star wars galaxies. This game is a Failure and isn t worth a rating. A good story driven game should make you feel like one in a billion not one of a billion

I liked the game when it was playable, unfortunately for me that was about half the time I was subscribed. I guess I fall into the 5% club because I have been having game issues almost since day 1. Crashes to desktop, characters stuck for days, not being able to log in for days, stuck at the loading screen for days, terminal lag, low FPS, about any issue that has come up I have had it. The TOR forum trolls want to explain away the problems some are having as the players fault or having a low end PC. The fact is that these issues are affecting people with all different types of computers from budget buys to high end gaming rigs. I played through the problems thinking that Bioware would fix these issues, after all the game just released a month ago, but they seem to be more worried about fixing player emotes and refunding items players purchase by mistake instead of working on the issues that are keeping people from playing. The customer support in this game is absolutely the worst ever ( not just my opinion, theres a few thousand posts on the TOR forums to back me up). I cancelled my subscription after my free 30 days, not because I didnt like the game but because of the 7 in-game tickets that went unanswered over the 5 weeks I played and the forums posts that CS never bothered to answer and all the issues the game has that arent getting addressed because they only affect about 5-10% of the playerbase. I really liked the game but the day I cancelled all i could do was stand in one place and chat with my guild, even the simple space missions were broken and unplayable. I really liked the game but the customer service (or lack of) has just ruined the game for me and many others.